“Come with me,” Oberi said.
Dano pulled the basin back. “I have to work.”
“You are not working anymore.”
The old man’s jaw hardened. “You left, Oberi. You built your life. You do not come back now and perform goodness for the crowd.”
“I’m not performing anything.”
“Then where were you when your mother died?”
The question cut so fast Oberi almost staggered.
“Where were you when the house was sold?” Dano continued, voice shaking now with more than age. “Where were you when I spent two weeks in a government hospital with nobody to visit me? Where were you when I had to start again like a beggar?”
Each question hit harder than the last.
Oberi had no answer that did not sound pathetic.
He had been in America.
Studying first. Then building a startup. Then protecting investors. Then scaling markets. One year had become two, then five, then ten. He had told himself he was doing it for family, that success abroad would one day rescue everyone back home.
He had sent money.
He had thought that was love in practical form.
But money had vanished somewhere between his hands and his father’s life.
“Please,” he said quietly. “Just come with me. Let me take you somewhere cool. Let me buy you food. Let us talk.”
For a long moment Dano said nothing.
Then, with the exhaustion of a man too tired to keep fighting the sun, he nodded once.
Oberi took the basin from him.
The weight nearly shocked him.
How had an old man carried that all day?
He helped his father into the Range Rover. Dano sat stiffly on the leather seat, too careful, as if afraid to stain something expensive just by existing. Oberi closed the door gently, then told the driver, “Find the nearest private clinic. A good one.”
“I don’t need a clinic,” Dano murmured.
“When was the last time you saw a doctor?”
Dano said nothing.
That was answer enough.
At the clinic in Victoria Island, the doctor was calm but blunt.
Severely malnourished.
Dangerously high blood pressure.
Anemia.
Early kidney stress.
Exhaustion.
“He should stop any strenuous work immediately,” she said, handing over prescriptions. “His body has been under extreme strain.”
Oberi nodded, but the shame inside him kept growing.
He could buy tech companies. Move millions with one phone call. Cancel meetings across continents.
And his father had been starving in Lagos.
They went next to a quiet restaurant nearby. Nothing too luxurious. Just good jollof rice, grilled fish, cold water, and enough privacy for grief to sit down between them.
Dano ate slowly, almost suspiciously, as if the food might be taken away if he reached for too much.
Oberi watched his father’s hands tremble around the fork.
This was the same man who had once made dining tables so smooth people ran their fingers across them twice just to admire the finish. The same hands that had built a cradle for Quacy when he was born. The same hands that had fixed Oberi’s school desk when it broke.
Now those hands shook from hunger.
“Tell me everything,” Oberi said.
Dano chewed carefully before answering.
“Your mother got sick two years after you left. Cancer. We did not know until it was late.”
Oberi lowered his eyes.
“I called you,” Dano said. “Many times.”
“I changed my number when I moved to California. I sent the new one in a letter.”
“We never got a letter.”
Quacy again.
Always Quacy.
“Your mother died three months later,” Dano continued. “The hospital bills took the house, the workshop, my tools. I sold everything. Quacy said he would help manage what was left.”
He gave a tired little laugh with no humor in it.
“He managed it into his own pocket.”
Oberi’s fists tightened under the table.
“I thought you knew,” Dano said. “He told me you were struggling in America. That your business had failed. That you sent little because you had little.”
“I sent two hundred thousand naira every month for ten years,” Oberi said, voice raw. “Every month. Never missed once.”
Dano went still.
For the first time, some of the hardness in his face changed shape.
“You really didn’t know.”
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